Olga Romanov: Background information when reading The Last Grand Duchess

Olga Romanov

This article relates to The Last Grand Duchess

Bryn Turnbull's historical novel The Last Grand Duchess narrates the story of Olga Romanov, the eldest child of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra and granddaughter of England's Queen Victoria. Olga was born in November 1895, and grew up a coddled royal child beloved by her parents and surrounded by servants, nannies and governesses. As the Romanov children grew up, visitors and the palace staff were surprised to discover that the strange mystic Grigori Rasputin, a favorite of the tsar and tsarina, was allowed to visit with them in the nursery. When one of the nannies complained, remarking of Rasputin, "He's always there, goes into the nursery, visits Olga and Tatiana while they are getting ready for bed, sits there talking to them and caressing them," she was fired soon after.

Like most female royal children throughout history, Olga's primary purpose was to secure an advantageous marriage. There were rumors that she might be wed to the Crown Prince of Serbia or Bulgaria's Prince Boris in order to maintain Nicholas's popularity in the Balkans. Romania's Prince Carol was another attractive option for the Romanovs. However, to their credit, it seems that Nicholas and Alexandra intended to allow Olga to have some say in choosing her husband. Talk of marriage for Olga was put on hold at the outbreak of World War I, however, during which she and her sister Tatiana worked as nurses at a hospital in Tsarskoe Selo, 15 miles south of St. Petersburg.

In 1915, Olga began writing romantic entries in her journal about a man she called "Mitya." The identity of this man remains unknown, though some historians have suggested he was Dmitri Malama, a wounded Russian soldier who lived for some time at the tsar's court. However, Malama has also been linked to Tatiana Romanov, and other historians assert that Olga's Mitya was Dmitri Shakh-Bagov, another wounded soldier she met while working as a nurse at the Tsarskoe Selo infirmary. When he became well enough to return to battle, Olga wrote in her journal, "Very lonesome without little darling Shakh-Bagov."

On December 30, 1916, the Romanovs received news that Rasputin had been murdered by noblemen Count Felix Yussopov and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who believed the mystic's influence with Nicholas and Alexandra was a potential threat to the security of the realm. Meanwhile, revolution was on the horizon. A decade of costly and punishing wars and Nicholas's resistance to democratizing economic and political reforms that would have improved the lives of a population beset by poverty, food shortages and inflation had sown the seeds for rebellion. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne on March 17, 1917, and the Romanov family was placed on house arrest. In the months that followed, they were shuffled around from Tsarskoe Selo to Siberia and then to a house in Ekaterinburg, in central Russia. All the while, the revolution raged on, with the Romanov-loyal White Army fighting the Red Army of resisting Bolsheviks. On the night of July 16, 1918, Alexei Romanov's physician Dr. Botkin woke the family and told them there were reports of unrest in town and they needed to go to the basement for their own safety. In the early morning hours of the 17th, the family was executed by their Bolshevik captors. Olga was just 22 years old.

Grand Duchess Olga Romanov, 1913, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to The Last Grand Duchess. It first ran in the March 2, 2022 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.